Puppy and Intel's NUC boards... will they work together?

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starhawk
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#16 Post by starhawk »

I have it on my everywhere. I'd probably have to bathe in V8. Which I really can't afford to do...

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RetroTechGuy
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#17 Post by RetroTechGuy »

starhawk wrote:I have it on my everywhere. I'd probably have to bathe in V8. Which I really can't afford to do...
No, don't bathe in it. Eliminate it from your diet... (you would be amazed the number of things that have tomatoes in them).
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#18 Post by starhawk »

Meh. I can live with it. Have for years now -- it's actually not that bad, in my case. I don't itch much at all. It doesn't look that great, but then the rest of me doesn't either... 5'3" ~210lbs guy with long hair who doesn't shave often enough :lol: I'm a sight.

wboz
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#19 Post by wboz »

Follow up question on this - the NUC comes without a SSD, and that's the most expensive add-on part you need to buy. Is it possible to run puppy on a computer WITHOUT a HDD installed?

Because if so this would actually be a much cheaper proposition :D

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#20 Post by RetroTechGuy »

wboz wrote:Follow up question on this - the NUC comes without a SSD, and that's the most expensive add-on part you need to buy. Is it possible to run puppy on a computer WITHOUT a HDD installed?

Because if so this would actually be a much cheaper proposition :D
There are a number of users who run without a HDD (often old broken machines). They run RW-CD, USB drive, etc.

My preference is to use a USB or SD card (flash memory). My Win7 laptop have a SD slot, where I installed Puppy. I use Puppy daily, and about once a month boot Win7 to check for updates, and whatnot... ;-)

For the board in question, that would be a good choice. I'd also look for one of the really stubby USB sticks. They make some that are barely longer than the metal housing...

Of course, eventually your USB flash may wear out, so periodically make copies of any important files (including your save file -- which should not be mounted when you copy it).

If you have a working machine, you should be able to install to the flash drive, then plug it into the board (I'm assuming that it will work with one of the Puppy versions, based on a report of running Debian).
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#21 Post by wboz »

Thanks, very useful info .. I really just needed to validate if in general Windows machines were OK booting without a HDD. My assumption was, as long as the Puppy media is in front of the HDD in the order, no problem. But sometimes devices refuse to boot if certain components aren't detected.

I realize probably no one can answer that for the NUC :)

A few other things about it:
1) There actually is no SD card reader, although there's plenty USB 3.0 ports and even two internal 2.0 headers if you wanted to hook up an SD card reader as a slow alternative to an HDD. (This is actually what budget laptop makers do!) Slow doesn't really worry Puppy though, since it's just on boot and afterwards runs in RAM.
2) There is an new NUC that allows 2.5inch drives. Cheaper presumably except that you probably pay more for the kit and then have a performance hit.
3) I love the NUC form factor and currently it's the only thing in that size that even HINTS at being high performance (there are some pico-ITX Atom boards that would be a big drag speed-wise, and the much larger mini-ITX are too big to be of any appeal to me even though that's where the smallest performance computers are).
4) I don't love that it's not modular at all. The NUC is basically ultrabook guts in a wee case, so the processor may say "i5" but it's got the GHz of a desktop i3 and is soldered to the board so you can never upgrade it. Once you stick an SSD and 8GB of RAM in this, it'll never get faster again ... and you have paid $500 for a tiny slow desktop computer.
5) But it's so good looking!!!! :twisted:

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#22 Post by wboz »

Question for the OP if he's still around .. how did the Atom board work out? Very curious :)

This sort of thing is what I am very interested in. Make it small, cheaply, but (hopefully) make it run well ...

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#23 Post by RetroTechGuy »

wboz wrote:Thanks, very useful info .. I really just needed to validate if in general Windows machines were OK booting without a HDD. My assumption was, as long as the Puppy media is in front of the HDD in the order, no problem. But sometimes devices refuse to boot if certain components aren't detected.
I've heard about issues with the newer Win-8 machines (the machines make it difficult to interrupt the boot sequence). So if you're doing that, you may want to do a search on it...

On my Win7, I just hit the F9 to get boot options (the BIOS was not happy with setting the SD card to be the first boot option -- or otherwise didn't work like I thought it should).

On my XP machines, I used Lin'N'Win to hook into the existing boot script.

http://www.icpug.org.uk/national/linnwi ... innwin.htm

I don't do the mods from Windows, I boot to Puppy -- it's easier...
I realize probably no one can answer that for the NUC :)

A few other things about it:
1) There actually is no SD card reader, although there's plenty USB 3.0 ports and even two internal 2.0 headers if you wanted to hook up an SD card reader as a slow alternative to an HDD. (This is actually what budget laptop makers do!) Slow doesn't really worry Puppy though, since it's just on boot and afterwards runs in RAM.
There are some guys here who have installed those, in place of a dead spinning HDD.

In my Win7 laptop, I put in a Class 10 SD. That helped quite a bit (the shutdown was painfully slow, due to the slow write speed of the Class 4 I was previously running).
2) There is an new NUC that allows 2.5inch drives.
I can't think of any reason you couldn't hang an external spinning HDD on it. Say, a laptop drive in an external case -- the USB should be able to power it fine.
4) I don't love that it's not modular at all. The NUC is basically ultrabook guts in a wee case, so the processor may say "i5" but it's got the GHz of a desktop i3 and is soldered to the board so you can never upgrade it. Once you stick an SSD and 8GB of RAM in this, it'll never get faster again ... and you have paid $500 for a tiny slow desktop computer.
5) But it's so good looking!!!! :twisted:
Yeah, I would wait until the price falls through the floor. I don't have a problem with machines that can't be upgraded, but they need to be cheap... These days I run machines so long that doing an incremental upgrade is almost silly -- just upgrade the whole bundle, and run it until the wheels fall off... ;-)

And having this thread pop us again, I had to do some browsing, to see what is cheap out there (being a Retro guy, I run older equipment -- and when "new", often closeouts or discontinued products). Looks like those are still too expensive, for what they are...

I think that the last time I did a hardware patch, I had a 900 Athlon whose MB had failed (that really wasn't all that long ago). I found a used (pull) MB that would support the processor, and would use my PC100 RAM that I had laying around -- $15 including the shipping, IIRC... :lol:
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#24 Post by wboz »

Gigabyte sells their own version of the NUC that is a big cheaper and includes more. They're a respected motherboard maker so I'd be happy to go with them.

But yeah they are expensive. Even more so if you wanted to put a Windows license on it .. that would be a total nonstarter!

My problem is the i5 ones are pretty pricy and the cheap ones are really subpar in terms of capabilities .. no free lunch I guess :)

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#25 Post by starhawk »

@wboz -- I'm still here, just not very active in this section :P

The PicoITX Atom motherboard is going to be replaced with another, as soon as the current one is sold on eBay. Problem is, that board I have uses a graphics setup called Poulsbo -- it's very Intel and it's very weird. It's also very not supported well by Linux, basically because Intel doesn't like Linux. That's a problem because, silly fellow that I am, I want to run the MATE desktop environment (basically GNOME 2) on this little fella and between the drivers and the hardware it just isn't working.

Fortunately it's worth a lot on eBay so I can sell it there and then buy a different board with fewer problems. I've picked one out already -- a Commell model, also PicoITX, that's got an older chipset with a graphics setup that predates Poulsbo a little. (It's also got a few other small things that make for fewer headaches in other places...) Should be smooth sailing with that.

I'd love it if you could link me to the Gigabyte NUC board, just for entertainment purposes... I won't buy it because I don't need that kind of power for what I do, but it's always fun to window-shop, you know?

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#26 Post by starhawk »

wboz, did you see my reply, above?

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#27 Post by wboz »

Sure thing. This is a Haswell i3 model but the line goes both up and down from there.

One thing I've realized recently after doing more research is that the "i3" and similar branding is just branding. And the capabilities aren't aligned across processor families. So an i7 Ultrabook processor will get creamed in benchmark test even against a basic desktop i3 one. The NUC and Brix both use U series, so an i3 is not at all comparable to, say, a Mini-ITX with a desktop i3 in its 1150 socket.

That's kind of disappointing to me.

But! Since I'm not a gamer, I still have hope. I'm particularly excited for the new Atom lineup (Bay Trail) which will be hitting the market soon - it's like 3x faster than the older Atoms, which means it should be quite decent. Supposedly an NUC is coming in Q1 ... and the best thing? $139!

Have you seen Bay Trail available in any similar MB/barebones setup (like the PicoITX)? As far as I know it's only being sold inside a tablet. I want something I can play with more :)

What is your Pico-ITX-related project?

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#28 Post by wboz »

Also ... where can you buy these pixo ITX items? I rarely see them listed with a price :/

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